conf.{B}.OLD1.&and.conf.NEW1.frame.work_ideas
I have found an analogy to our system-considerations, musings, etc. in my work in designing and developing for the web: what I find is that the system idea is actually instrumental in defining that transition point between a web site (static, 1D) and an /application/: somehow multi-dimensional, functional, more dynamic.
I can draw a direct connection from the definition we have been building for systems more generally (starting point, consideration of the neighborhood, auto-evolution) but also, it becomes clear in the actual experience of /building/, that somehow the thing I am working on is becoming more complex, almost taking on the characteristics of language, and in that, I think, it becomes systematic. Meaning patterns appear, and more concretely tools I use in one instance are adapted to another: in fact the way the DOM works, the cross-pollination of html, css and js on the client side, and then (in my case) python within the Django framework for web applications on the back-end, all start talking to each other in unsuspected ways! Suddenly, I can invoke a design idea I came up with months ago by mere reference to a css class: the design becomes part of a new pattern just established and brings /continuity/. In all sorts of manners, there are echoes, reflections, …
I think of /A Pattern Language: Towns, Buildings, Construction/ by Christopher Alexander here. This book obviously is about architecture. But things get really intriguing when I actually take the basic modus operandi (identifying abstracted, archetypical instances, using them consciously for design projects) and apply it to a whole new field: what I am doing here.
So it really is a language then. I chose the punctuation, the occasional exclamation mark, or rather, this comes out of itself, organically: that, to me, strikes at the heart of what actually makes this a language. Like human language, that lives on, mutates, and is around long after the actual bearer perishes, this has a life of its own, with its own rules, idiosyncrasies. This is the system in my conference work, actually.
